Field Trip

                           Twenty years I can't believe twenty years have gone by since it happened so long ago in Nam. The narrow mountain pass where it happened where the mortar shots took my platoon with it except for me. It happened when I was takin' a piss out in the bush a little higher up just minding my business and getting ready to join up with my platoon, that's when the mortar shots began. I took a bullet to the shoulder as I ran for cover. The rain hadn't stopped in days and the face of the mountain turned to mud. Some of the mortar shots hit a small rocky ridge causing a land slide all the mud and rock came down onto where my platoon had set up camp. The Lieutenant had said that ridge would provide shelter from enemy fire, but it fell with the rain and came oozing down over them, all my comrades who had become brothers—gone. A little earlier we had called for a dustoff chopper, one man I didn't know well had died, he always trailed behind nervous and bug eyed, poor fella' was his second day, but couldn't tell left from right up from down he was just disoriented. Wrong guy in the wrong place, he just could't take it. All the chopper ended up takin' was me, brought me back to the rear to fix me up after that bullet I took to the shoulder. They asked me what happened before the chopper took off I explained everythin' down to why I wasn't there with them all at our camping area. I forgot to mention it was nighttime and most of the men were in their foxholes when the mud slid down the mountainside, to seal them in as if they were tunnel rats, forever sealed away in enemy occupied land. I tried to think about the hospitals and the cute nurses, but I couldn't I felt as little as I could have done responsible and I wasn't even the Lieutenant who had been responsible for the lot of us, he was gone too. So now today twenty years later I stand infront of the area where the land crumbled I walk over to where I was when it all happened next to some tall trees and looked down at where there was no ridge but just a small mound formed by the fallen dirt which was overgrown with plants, weeds, and tall grasses.